Anesthesiology Team Recognized for Protocols to Prevent Post-Surgical Opioid Addiction

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Anesthesiology Team Recognized for Protocols to Prevent Post-Surgical Opioid Addiction

The team from MedStar Georgetown University Hospital earned honors for its research to mitigate operating-room contributions to opioid addiction. “Almost any surgery can be done without opioids,” says study lead Dr. Joseph Myers (front row, second from left)

According to an NIH study, of those who began abusing opioids in the 2000s, 75 percent reported that their first opioid was a prescription drug. As the opioid crisis in the U.S. intensifies, the urgency to use safer post-surgical pain-management alternatives increases. Over the past 10 years, anesthesiology professor Joseph Myers, M.D., has built a program at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital to mitigate operating-room contributions to opioid addiction.

“Anesthesiologists have the ability to not only help prevent addiction but to avoid relapse in recovering addicts who need surgery,” says Myers.

This year his team was recognized by the American Society of Anesthesiologists and awarded first place for its “Comfort- Safe Program: A Safe Path for Patients in Recovery From Opioid Addiction.”

“I realized that opioids were causing a lot of problems in the operating room—patients’ blood pressure would drop, and we’d be resuscitating some very sick patients because they couldn’t tolerate opioids,” says Myers. “So instead we started using local anesthesia along with a variety of non-opioid analgesics, such as ketorolac and IV acetaminophen.” Patients were waking up without pain or the predisposition to addiction. “The truth is, almost any surgery can be done without opioids—especially before and during the anesthesia.”

The ComfortSafe anesthesia protocol is a checklist of methods and modalities of non-opioid analgesics that patients can choose from—including any type of music.

Myers finds that music has a powerful effect on everyone in the operating room.

“Staff are typically rushed and driven by the clock,” Myers says. With music, their voices get lower, slower, and more hushed. “The family sees their loved ones going into surgery with Joshua Bell being played and they think, ‘Oh, my gosh, he’s in good hands.’ You gain trust and confidence from patients when they sense you are performing the surgery the way they want. You’re listening to them, and they have a little bit of control restored to them.”